Introduction

In the second half of the sixteenth century—during the reign of Elizabeth I—a new English culture was forming. Far different from the late medieval culture of pre‐Reformation England, it was the foundation for a new society whose assumptions, values, and actions were markedly “early modern.”

Europeans in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries lived through an era of intense cultural and social dislocation. Across the continent, established ideas about metaphysical and social order were stressed, broken, rejected, confused, and reformed. Outbreaks of religious violence were the most obvious indicators of these tensions, but they were also accompanied with new understandings of social duty and organization. The religious ideologies of the era warred with one another and the governors of their societies struggled to retain control and advance their own visions of what God required of them.

In England, these struggles took peculiar styles, shaped by the nation’s history, customs, and unique religious reforms. The generations of Elizabethans fought to live their lives in a culture that was deeply torn over its values, trying out new ways of living and expressing themselves. The results of their battles are celebrated as the “Elizabethan Age,” the cultural crucible of the modern English‐speaking world.

Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be: That is the question,” first heard by theater goers in about 1600, poses a conundrum that had resonances for people of the Elizabethan age.1 They, in their own rough ways, were all looking for themselves in the welter of old and new ideas and experiences that rushed upon the later sixteenth century. It was a time of particularly rapid change in English society, and it left everyone with puzzles about how to live in a world that was radically conservative and rapidly changing. God, salvation, duty, obedience, pleasure, purpose, domestic roles, and universal absolutes were being questioned by people swimming in the rip currents of conflicting truths.

Everyone was coping with the terror of history, using the tools at hand to understand themselves, their society, and their cosmos. In that sense, they were like us, but they lived in a different reality that gave their universe very different organization, reasons, and options.

This book reflects those reasons, options, beliefs, and experiences. It is about how Elizabethans understood themselves, how they perceived reality and acted on this perception. It is about the negotiations between the presumed static order of a divinely governed world and the rapid changes in thinking, knowing, and doing occurring in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Its goal is to make early modern English ways of thinking and behaving understandable, so that its readers can make informed assumptions about how Elizabethans chose the explanations and actions that seemed appropriate to them. Being Elizabethan is a portrait of how Elizabethans, as reasonable agents, living in a transformative time, pursued ends determined by their reason in the context of their lives.

Of course, there was no typical Elizabethan. They came in infinite variety. But they shared aspirations, world views, and values that mark them out as people of a particular time and place.

I define “Elizabethans” as those individuals who were fully adult in 1558 and those who, educated in her reign, lived beyond 1603. They incorporate roughly four generations, born between about 1520 and 1590. They shared many events in Elizabeth’s reign, but experienced them according to their ages, educations, and social roles.

Trying to capture how people reasoned in their lives is like trying to carry water in a sieve. As soon as you have scooped it up, it leaks out in tiny individualized streams. Historians are challenged to put individuals in context. We know we cannot understand the actions of an individual without understanding the system of values, historical events, and connections within which they lived. But we also recognize that within those contextualizing embraces, there are myriad individual choices defining individual acts and thoughts

No one’s choices and expressions in the Elizabethan age were entirely determined by the perceptions sketched in this book, but it is also true that no one’s choices and expressions were unconstrained by these perceptions. People were in a negotiation with their society and their God. It was a negotiation inflected by the ideas they shared with one another, and by the experiences they had in common, whether in terms of demographics (e.g., gender, age), occupations, social groups (e.g., families), common modes of expression (e.g., the Book of Common Prayer), societal structures (e.g., the legal system), or modes of presentation (e.g., the printing press, the pulpit). Everyone was interacting with institutions and audiences both internally and externally. No one could find self‐understanding or engage in social activity without using their shared modes of perception. They lived within a grid of meaning and experience.

The last major attempt to capture the Elizabethan “times” was A.L. Rowse’s two volumes, The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Life of the Society (1971) and The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Cultural Achievement (1972). These took up, he said, “the life of the mind, the values and creative achievements that redeem the record.”2 The first volume ticked the usual boxes of social history—food, lodging, sex, belief—while the second explored the expressions of the “English Renaissance” in drama, music, art, science, and medicine. Accessible, entertaining, and informative, Rowse’s books are still in print. Scholarship has advanced far beyond where he left it in 1972, however.

Rowse expressed the rhetorical problem facing attempts to capture the way Elizabethans made sense of their lives. How do you give such a sprawling topic a “vertebrate structure”?3 How can you create a narrative out of a shapeless, bubbling mass of human values and interchanges? Believing that the “ultimate constituent of history is an individual life,” Rowse preferred to tell stories, describing good history as the “Conception of the course of events as a historical, spiritual process—as applied in the philosophy of Hegel.”4

Being Elizabethan is my attempt to put Elizabethans into the spirit of their age, but with a vertebrate structure much different from Rowse’s. I assume that we can only make sense of Elizabethans by listening to how they shaped their choices in the face of historical circumstances. When confronted with a problem, how did they understand its origins? Make sense of its impacts? Conceptualize possible responses? How did they understand good and bad, desirable and undesirable?

Holding my work together is a conviction that has been thrust upon me by the evidence: Elizabethans’ perceptions were shaped by a deep belief in God’s Word, but they could never agree on the right balance of authority for applying His Word. This accounts for the tension and creativity that marked the era and ushered in the beginning of a secular society based on individualism.

The question animating all my journeys into the Elizabethan world is, “When people believe something, how do they enact their belief?” I have sought to define how Elizabethans perceived the issues confronting them, looking for actions that are predicated on their perceptions. I also want to know how belief is influenced by the experience of actions taken and the realities of life.

The goal is to invoke the natural responses of Elizabethans to the world as they met it. To do this, I put down layers of values, virtues, social orders, and education, building up the “base” Elizabethan. I then complicate their enduring values—the sort of “truths” they would give you if you asked them about what should be—with jarring changes that disturbed but did not dethrone those values, creating great social tensions. Attempting to harmonize the disturbances, I explore how Elizabethans understood causation, providence, economics, and politics.

I delineate what they believed in and how they learned those beliefs. I then introduce the challenges to those beliefs. Finally, I explore the adaptations made to accommodate both belief and lived experience. A world, presumed to be static, is disrupted by rapid change, creating new syntheses, placing more emphasis on individual choice, and complicating personal and communal identities.

The book begins by describing the idealized lives of the departed. “Speak nothing but good of the dead” was a sentiment widely held in the early modern period. Believing that ancestors should be models for their successors, Elizabethans portrayed the departed in idealized terms. Funeral sermons, epitaphs, funeral monuments, memorial poems, moralizing verses, and other genres didactically taught the living to prepare for death. They summarized what it meant to be a good man or woman. Most of these models of goodness were biblical and traditional, but they also evolved as religious values changed. In 1558, Queen Mary was an ideal Christian because she, a chaste and honorable woman, had memorized the Psalms in Latin, knew the responses in the mass, and recognized the Pope as her spiritual leader. Katherine Brettergh, who died in 1601, was an equally chaste and honorable lady who read her Bible constantly and hated popes....